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A Love Affair - Nimble Smart Contacts for Outlook Mobile

Social
Selling pioneer Nimble has an awesome start into 2017. First it got number 1 in
CRM satisfaction by G2Crowd earlier in January, then friend and CRM godfather
Paul Greenberg named Nimble a winner
of the 2017 CRM Watchlist awards, and now Nimble announces the Smart
Contacts add-in for Outlook, a deep integration into Outlook for iOS, with an
integration into Outlook for Android coming soon.

The Nimble Smart Contacts add-in brings the
power of Nimble’s view on contacts to Outlook for mobile users, after the
widget and Outlook add-on already offered this functionality for the web- and
Outlook clients.

The add-on follows the philosophy that for
most companies the e-mail account is still their CRM system; given this, this
is a straightforward enhancement. Nimble acknowledges that there are two main
email systems used in businesses: Gmail and Office365, and now fully supports
them both. This integration delivers the profiling data that the Nimble back
end gathers practically at any place. The browser add-in already today allows
to get profiling information about contacts in other CRM systems, e.g.
Salesforce or MS Dynamics and works seamlessly in Google Apps and Office365.

Nimble's Outlook Sidebar

“The biggest cause of communication failure is lack
of knowledge of who someone is or what their business is about,” says Jon
Ferrara, CEO of Nimble.

This add-on is closing one missing link in
the chain by making it part of Outlook and reducing the need for having yet
another app. Relevant business insight about people in a mail conversation and
their companies is now directly available in the email client.

Smart Contact Manager

The
add-on, along with the above-mentioned Outlook Add-in, and the available
Dynamcis integration, puts Nimble squarely between Microsofts Outlook
Customer Manager and a full-scale Dynamics implementation – an interesting
thought that I will continue below.

Considering the fact that Jon was on an “intense
visit to Redmond” last year, an add-on like this shouldn’t come as a major
surprise. The major surprise would rather be if this would be the only piece
that is going to come.

And it isn’t.

In a conversation today about things CRM
Jon gave me some more snippets of information. What I can say is this: Nimble
is a pilot partner for Microsoft’s Cloud Solution Partner program. With this it
is likely that Microsoft Sales can go pitching Nimble to their customers.
Microsoft is also funding Nimble to develop applications on Azure. This is an
interesting move for Microsoft as it can potentially put quite some additional
load on Azure.

My Take

Although on the outset it doesn’t look like
it, this can be a big thing.

If this partnership goes deeper than a mere
add-in to Outlook, then there are quite some benefits for both parties,
Microsoft and Nimble. Nimble gets better access to the huge Microsoft customer-
and partner base with a corresponding reach, which should translate to a boost
of customers and thus revenue.

Microsoft on the other side gets access to
a Social Sales solution that is placed at the lower end of the market, which is
far from being saturated. And Microsoft gets access to a solution that is
natural to people who do not yet use a CRM system, as it is built around the
Inbox. Together with Nimble’s stickiness (very high user satisfaction according
to G2Crowd), the existing
integration into Dynamics and the above mentioned Azure development joint
Nimble-Microsoft customers also get a clear upgrade path to MS Dynamics.

As it is right now, Nimble is positioned
between the Outlook Customer Manager and MS Dynamics. Surely there is a big gap
between Nimble and Dynamics, but as it stands this is rather a good thing, as
said above. Being Microsoft I would consider subsidizing the Nimble add-on
instead of continuing to offer their own Outlook Customer Manager.

So why could this be a big thing, you ask?

Imagine the following: The Smart Contacts
App, or rather Nimble becoming part of the Office365 fabric, working with the
full Microsoft application stack, like Outlook, Skype, Team, Dynamics,
Office365, LinkedIn, PowerBI. Add the fact that many smaller businesses are
still working without a CRM system, but merely use their mail client – and MS
Office. Continue the thought with: Salesforce, SugarCRM, SAP, Dynamics are too
expensive and too ‘clumsy’, user-unfriendly. Add the idea of a deep integration
into the Office Graph/LinkedIn graph, and all of the sudden there is a powerful
and affordable social sales application.

Mind you, there still would be gaps on the
service and especially marketing side, but this is a story for another day. For
now I do see huge potential in this partnership.

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